Top 5 reasons why you should never pay for cheap SEO

We get it, running a business is not cheap, but that does not mean you should engage in cheap marketing and SEO strategies. Some may find this post a bit blunt however, there is no other way to state the facts. There are many digital marketing companies that will just take whatever they can get and then deal with the damage control later.

Yes, the pricing of search engine optimisation varies a lot by industry and competition. A small local marketing campaign for a car mechanic or panel beater can get away with a cheap SEO however, someone like a florist who wants to service quite a few areas or other eCommerce stores will not have the luxury to pay for very cheap search engine optimisation.

Not going to lie, we as well as many other online marketing companies have lost clients elsewhere as they have been promised the world with little budget. We still track most of these customers and notice after a few months their results begin to drop. Now, go work on getting them back.

Since everyone has been dictated to stay at home over the past few years your online presence is now more important than ever so it is ideal you get your SEO right. Also, with even more people now looking online and businesses investing in this, SEO is getting harder. There are quite a few reasons why you should not engage in cheap SEO projects and here are our top 5.

1. Cheap SEO is under-resourced and won’t get you results

Let’s think of it this way. You are paying for very cheap SEO to a digital marketing company. That agency, just like your business, has overheads –

• They need to pay for their own advertising
• They need to pay for your advertising and outreach teams
• They need to pay for your content teams
• They need to pay for their staff wages and contractors who are working on your campaign
• They need to pay for equipment
• They need to pay for subscriptions and bills
• Let’s not forget the time spent working on your project.

How much do you think will be left over to spend on your project? No business should run at a loss or next to nothing just to work on an under budget project. Guess what? They don’t. If an agency is going to take you on board with a next to nothing budget, they will most likely be pocketing the money and barely doing any of the work which you will notice when you are not getting results.

2. Cheap SEO will most likely have you locked in a contract

I mean, how else are they going to make money? Most cheap SEO campaigns come with a 1 year contract, and with the project already under-resourced you will be stuck paying a monthly fee with poor results for a long time.

Proper SEO companies, like Digital Debut (of course!), set the expectations early with their customers and charge what is needed to get results within an acceptable period. They also do not lock any of their customers into contracts and hold them hostage as they know they are skilled enough to get the results with the right number of resources.

3. Cheap SEO will most likely be sent overseas or to very underqualified consultants

We are not saying that it is bad to send SEO overseas, we have partners outside of Australia who send us their clients to do SEO for them but when a campaign is under budget that SEO will be sent overseas with a good dollar difference to someone who is just learning SEO. Those so called “experts” may even get your website penalised causing you not to rank at all. You can find many skilled SEO consultants outside of your country, but they charge what they are worth, not peanuts.

4. Cheap SEO campaigns will most likely be done by someone in the business just starting out

Nothing wrong with getting the newbie to manage your search engine optimisation campaign as we all started off somewhere, but do you really want to? Most people will say will prefer an expert with many years of experience to do this, but the reality is that the experts are very busy working on larger campaigns that require a lot more attention and with clients who have a proper budget.

Low cost campaigns will be good for smaller businesses just wanting to target the small local area. Don’t worry, the newbie working on your local SEO should be trained up by an expert!

5. Cheap SEO is a false sense of reality

There, we said it. These cheap campaigns give business owners a false sense of reality. There is no such thing as a get rich quick marketing campaign or growing your business by a considerable amount for next to nothing. If this was really the case everyone will be doing it. Stop listening to those tools that post videos next to their Lamborghini saying stuff like “we have learned the secret to grow your business revenue 10 times in 2 months”. No, it’s not true, everyone knows this, and for the ones that do work is because those business owners actually ended up paying a lot more money and invested a lot more time into their campaign.

Really, it is common sense, you want it to be true, the snake oil salesperson is selling the search engine optimisation service at the best prices and has an awesome pitch promising all sorts of things but that’s all it is, talk, and we all know, talk is cheap.

So how much should you pay? That depends on your industry and expectations. Don’t worry, a good SEO team will get you results so you don’t have to worry about your budget going to waste. What are the top questions to ask to know if you are working with a good search engine optimisation company? We will cover that in another post!